Background
The film Electric Dreams was to be director Steve Barron's first full feature film. Previously Barron had made a name for himself conceiving and directing a number of innovative music videos during the early 1980s. His biggest success had been directing the music video for The Human League's "Don't You Want Me" in 1981 which helped the single become number one in the UK and U.S.
For the film Electric Dreams Barron wanted to emulate the huge success of the film Flashdance a year earlier. Flashdance had used the electronic music of Giorgio Moroder, so Barron enlisted Moroder as director of music, who wrote most of the score. Barron wanted the end credits to roll to "an emotional" song in the same way as Flashdance had done.
Moroder wrote "Together in Electric Dreams" which was to be a male solo vocal, when he asked who Barron would like to sing the lyrics, Barron immediately thought of his former associate Philip Oakey.
When Oakey recorded the song it was over very quickly, after the first full recording Moroder told Oakey that the first take was "good enough, as first time is always best". Oakey who thought he was just rehearsing insisted on doing another take. Moroder let him but to this day Oakey is convinced that Moroder still used the first take on the final production. Originally released to advertise the film, "Together in Electric Dreams" quickly overshadowed the original film and became a hit single in its own right.
Oakey states that it is ironic that a track that took literally ten minutes to record would become a worldwide hit, while some of his Human League material that took over a year to record didn't.
Read more about this topic: Together In Electric Dreams
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“I had many problems in my conduct of the office being contrasted with President Kennedy’s conduct in the office, with my manner of dealing with things and his manner, with my accent and his accent, with my background and his background. He was a great public hero, and anything I did that someone didn’t approve of, they would always feel that President Kennedy wouldn’t have done that.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)